stoplist (thing)

A list of words which should not be included in an index , for example, a library catalog or an index of words and phrases in a thesaurus. Stoplists usually include "little" words such as "the", "this", "a", "and", "it", and so on -- words that are very common, but don't mean all that much on their own. After all, it wouldn't be very useful to retrieve a list of book titles that contain the word "the"; plus, it could be a REALLY big list!

One familiar example of a stoplist is the list found at The Everything search is currently parsing out these words:. (Interestingly, this list includes the words "everything", "node", and "writeup" -- probably, because they are extremely common in node titles. ) The consequence of this is that, if you search on a word or phrase, and either it is not found, or you checked the "ignore exact" button, the E2 search will look for all nodes that mention any of the words in your original query -- EXCEPT if it is a word on the stoplist.